But the superstitions and the false psychology which gave rise at first to the notion of a continued life after death would not, of course, disappear with the introduction of burning. The primitive cremationists may have hoped, by reducing to ashes the bodies of their dead, to prevent the recurrence of the corpse to the presence of the living; but they could not prevent the recurrence of the ghost in the dreams of the survivors; they could not prevent the wind that sighed about the dead man’s grave, the bats that flitted, the vague noises that terrified, the abiding sense of the corpse’s presence. All the factors that go to make up the ghost or the revenant (to use a safe word less liable to misinterpretation) still remained as active as ever. Hence, I believe, with the introduction of cremation the conception of the ghost merely suffered an airy change. He grew more shadowy, more immaterial, more light, more spiritual. In one word, he became, strictly speaking, a ghost as we now understand the word, not a returning dead man. This conception of the ghost as essentially a shade or shadow belongs peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating peoples. I can answer for it that among negroes, for example, the “duppy” is conceived as quite a material object. It is classical literature, the literature of the cremating Greeks and Romans, that has familiarised us most with the idea of the ghost as shadowy and intangible. Burying races have more solid doubles. When Peter escaped from prison in Jerusalem, the assembled brethren were of opinion that it must be “his angel.” The white woman who lived for years in a native Australian tribe was always spoken of by her hosts as a ghost. In one word, at a low stage of culture the _revenant_ is conceived of as material and earthly; at a higher stage, he is conceived of as immaterial and shadowy.